IBM Connect 2017: Finally Comes to the West Coast!

Wonderful, Amazing news: IBM Connect 2017 will be held at Moscone Centre in San Francisco, CA February 19 – 22! This announcement was made today by Inhi Cho Suh, the new General Manager of IBM Collaborative Services (ICS). How significant is this? For so many years I have known so many IBM ICS brand professionals who wanted to go to this conference, but could not get approval to fly to the far corner of the country to go to “Disney World” for Lotusphere or ConnectEd or now Connect. Europe gets its version of the big conference and user group conferences like Engage, going on right now where this announcement was made.

One year there was a user group conference in Las Vegas. Hated the venue (it’s Vegas), but it had great attendance from west coast professionals. Other than that, the western half of the U.S. has been a desert for gatherings of ICS professionals. So finally IBM is recognizing the value of the western half of the country as a market. Somehow I expect a little fruit company may have had some influence in the site selection…

Moscone Centre, San Francisco, CA

Along this same line, I am pleased to announce I will be working with IBM and others to restart a user group on the west coast. More details are coming soon.

It is great to have such a highly motivated person in command. It is also great to see Ed Brill back as part of the brand. See you in San Francisco in 2017!

A little googling and the Domino Web Developers Conferences were Anaheim, CA 1996 and S.F. Moscone Center 1997. At the S.F. event, they bussed us to the Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts for an evening event.

These were secondary to Lotusphere so I guess “Connect” is not really coming *back* to the West coast….just following the dev conferences 20 years later 😉